- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- South Okanagan—West Kootenay
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $128,729.57
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, I am happy once again to rise and speak to Bill S-5, a bill that updates the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
I have spoken a couple of times on this bill at various stages, and I will repeat some of the messages I gave in those speeches. Here we are at third reading. We have responded to the committee report, which brought forward a few amendments, including one from the NDP that was voted on at report stage. At committee, Conservatives and Liberals took out a statement about tailings ponds in particular. The NDP proposed a report stage amendment that put those words back into Bill S-5 that were put there originally by the Senate, which dealt with this bill before us, and I was happy that amendment passed.
Now, I am a bit discouraged that Conservatives seem to be indicating they are withdrawing their support for this bill just because of those two words, “tailings ponds”, going back into it. I am not sure why they consider the words so toxic that they cannot support the bill, but we are very much of the opinion that it really needs to be highlighted as one of the points in protecting the Canadian environment. We have had so many issues around tailings ponds, not just in the last few months at the Kearl project in Alberta, but in British Columbia with the Mount Polley disaster, and various other situations. This bill, Bill S-5, and the Canadian Environmental Protection Act really deal with how we should deal with toxins that are put into the Canadian environment, and tailings ponds are one example of where, when we have disasters, an inordinate number of toxins are poured into the environment at once. I think that requires special mention, and I am glad we see that wording back in this version of the bill here at third reading.
Just to give some background, this bill was first introduced in the previous Parliament as Bill C-28. It was never brought to the floor of the House to debate, and, months later, the government called an election, so it died on the Order Paper. However, it gave Canadians and environmental law experts and scientists a chance to look at this long-overdue bill to update the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, as it has been over 20 years. Those people found a lot to be concerned about that was missing from the bill. The government had a year to answer those concerns, yet in this Parliament it introduced the bill exactly as it was in Bill C-28, so there was no attempt to fix things ahead of time, which has caused real problems.
I have even heard Liberals saying in debate at report stage that we need a new version of CEPA, so we need a new bill to update it as quickly as possible to fix those things, because they were found to be out of scope. We cannot expand the scope of bills here in this place once they come to us, and this bill requires some of that desperately, which I will talk about later.
Since CEPA was first introduced over 20 years ago, the number of chemicals that people in Canada are exposed to in their daily lives has grown exponentially. I think it has grown by over 50 times since 1950 and is expected to continue on that trajectory. All these chemicals are toxic in their own way. These are brand-new chemicals that natural environments have no experience with, and we are only discovering, year after year, the impacts of these chemicals on our environment, our health and the health of plants and animals in our environment, even at very small levels. Over the last two decades, science has discovered more about the cumulative effects of even small doses of these toxic chemicals, and without this modernized legislation, Canadians would continue to be exposed to unregulated and harmful chemicals.
This is long overdue. Environmental scientists and environmental legal experts have long recognized that. Some of the changes that Bill S-5 would make to CEPA that are significant are the recognition of the right to a healthy environment, and I will talk more about that later; the commitment to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, under the act; strengthening the chemicals management plan, including to take into consideration vulnerable populations, cumulative effects, reproductive and endocrine toxicity, carcinogenicity, mutagenicity and neurotoxicity; alternatives and class-based assessments to avoid harmful substitutions; and labelling and other-risk communication.
I would like to back up now and just say how Canadians are so proud of this country, and one of the great sources of that pride is our environment. We are blessed to live in a vast country, and our relatively small population, concentrated at the southern border, has given us the impression that our environment will remain clean, healthy and sustainable, no matter what we do to it and no matter what we throw at it. That attitude has, obviously, gradually changed over the last 50 years or so, and now over 90% of Canadians believe that it is important that we have the explicit right to live in a clean and healthy environment. It is very timely that this bill finally recognizes that right.
Last year, on July 28, 2022, the UN General Assembly passed a unanimous resolution that recognized the right to a healthy environment around the world. One hundred and fifty-nine countries already have legal obligations to protect the human right to a healthy environment, but Canada does not. There are environmental bills of rights in Ontario, Quebec, Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, but there is no federal law that explicitly recognizes the right to live in a healthy environment. Bill S-5 would change that, so it is a positive step forward, but it is important to back up declarations of rights with legislation that enforces those rights.
Unfortunately, the previous version of CEPA was considered unenforceable, and this one is no better. In fact, the Senate committee studying Bill S-5 wanted to fix this enforceability and, quite remarkably, the senators attached this note to the bill when they sent it forward to the House. After they had passed it with the amendments that they could make, they attached this message. I have read this message in each of the speeches I have given, but it is so remarkable that it bears repeating. This is what the Senate committee said:
This committee would like to state their concern that the right to a healthy environment cannot be protected unless it is made truly enforceable. This enforceability would come by removing the barriers that exist to the current remedy authority within Section 22 of CEPA, entitled “Environmental Protection Action.” There is concern that Section 22 of CEPA contains too many procedural barriers and technical requirements that must be met to be of practical use. As Bill S-5 does not propose the removal or re-evaluation of these barriers, this Committee is concerned that the right to a healthy environment may remain unenforceable.
As I said before, the reason the Senate did not amend this bill to make it enforceable is that it was considered out of scope. The real disappointment here, of course, is that the government had a year to fix this. It knew that this enforceability was one of the main concerns people had about Bill C-28 in the previous Parliament, but the government did not fix it. I don't know whether that was just out of incompetence or whether it really did not want to fix it.
This relates directly to the welcome new declaration in Bill S-5 that Canadians have a right to live in this healthy and clean environment, but we need a transparent and open process to hold the government to account with respect to that declaration and to that right.
As I have said, CEPA is primarily concerned with protecting Canadians and their environment from the toxic chemicals we are so good at inventing, producing and pumping into our environment. There has been a fiftyfold increase in those chemicals over the past number of decades. However, CEPA does not concern itself in general with other matters of federal legislation around the environment, such as environmental impact assessments, fish habitat, migratory birds, species at risk, etc., so this declaration of the right to live in a clean, healthy environment has rather narrow coverage. It covers only matters within the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
I have a private member's bill, Bill C-219, that is called the Canadian environmental bill of rights. It was first written and presented by Linda Duncan, the former NDP MP for Edmonton Strathcona. Ms. Duncan is an expert environmental lawyer who produced this environmental bill of rights and introduced it over three Parliaments during her time here. It passed second reading in 2009 or 2010 and went to committee, but each time she presented it, it did not make it through the full Senate procedure, so it never became law. I was very honoured and happy to present it again as Bill C-219 in this Parliament.
Among other things, it basically takes that right to live in a clean, healthy environment that Bill S-5 talks about and expands it to the other Canadian federal legislation that we have that deals with the environment. It is not a broad-brush approach, but specifically attached to those pieces of legislation. In fact, when the House of Commons legal team was asked whether it was constitutional, the answer was that of course it is constitutional because it is not really an environmental bill; it is a human rights bill. It holds the government to account for doing what it should be doing under those different environmental pieces of legislation that we have at the federal level.
I would like to make it clear that the NDP will be voting in favour of Bill S-5. We are happy that the government has ceded to some of the amendments that we wanted bring in to improve Bill S-5. We did not get all that we wanted, but we think this is an important step forward, and we are certainly happy that there is language about the right to live in a clean and healthy environment that is finally recognized within federal legislation. We are happy that this bill confirms the government's commitment to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples under the act.
This bill has many shortcomings, some of which I have listed, but one that I have not mentioned is the total lack of anything around air pollution, toxins in the air. This is something that we really have to get into federal legislation, because it is just as important, if not more so, than some of the other forms of pollution we have to deal with.
I am heartened to hear comments from Liberal members that they would welcome a new version of Bill S-5, a brand new update to CEPA that would bring in some of the problems that have been considered out of scope here, especially around enforceability.
As I say, most Canadians, including myself, would be happy to see this bill pass. I know that most parties will be voting for this bill, albeit some reluctantly. I am disappointed to hear that the Conservatives seem to be pulling their support over the tailings ponds issue. I hope that the Senate will deal with it promptly, so that we can enjoy its benefits and quickly start the process of crafting that new bill that will make CEPA even stronger. That act would truly protect Canadians and ensure that we, along with our children and grandchildren, can continue to live in the clean and healthy environment that is our right.
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Madam Speaker, again, we had 22 years before Bill C-28 to fix this. We have had two years since then. This should have been a much better bill. We now have the right to live in a clean and healthy environment within the scope of CEPA, not within the scope of the rest of the federal mandate, so it is a tiny step. We should be doing better. We could have done so much better if the government had done so.
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Madam Speaker, Canadians care about the health of their environment. According to polling, 92% of Canadians believe the government should recognize the right to live in a healthy environment. Canada has several major pieces of legislation on environmental protection, but the Canadian Environmental Protection Act is the centrepiece of that commitment.
Bill S-5, which we are debating here today, is the long-awaited update to that act. It has been 24 years since the last update, and there has been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Some of that water likely contained some of the many new toxins we have invented in the last two decades, and that is one thing that needed to be updated with this bill. We have also learned a great deal about the cumulative effects of even tiny doses of these toxins. We literally have to run to keep up with the ways we are damaging the environment here in Canada and around the world.
People concerned about the environment welcomed the effort to update the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, or CEPA, as it known for short, and the NDP welcomed that too. It is long overdue.
I want to spend a bit of time talking about the history of this particular bill, as I think it puts some of the efforts to fix CEPA in a better context.
The bill was first introduced in the previous Parliament as Bill C-28, tabled in April 2021, two years ago. However, the government did not bring it to the floor of the House for debate that spring and then called an election in the summer, so that ended that version of the bill.
Environmental law experts across the country analyzed that bill and began to drop ideas to make it better when it came back to Parliament. There was some hope that the government would take some of those ideas and amend the new version before reintroducing it so that things would not be considered out of scope. Instead, it tabled the exact same version of the bill, the same as Bill C-28, in the Senate in February 2022, where it took on its life as Bill S-5, the bill we are debating today. The Senate took a long, serious look at the bill in committee, improved it in several ways and sent it to the House at the end of June last year, and the House took it up last fall. It has since been through second reading debate and committee, and we see it here at report stage.
This bill, at its heart, is about allowing Canadians to live in a clean, healthy environment. Much of its detail is in regulations around toxic chemicals, chemicals we have invented and continue to invent and chemicals released into the environment, whether knowingly or not, that can directly affect our health and degrade the ecosystems we all depend on.
One new and very important part of this bill is the long-overdue inclusion of language that declares that Canadians have the right to live in a healthy environment. Last year, on July 28, 2022, the UN General Assembly passed a unanimous resolution that recognized the right to a healthy environment around the world. A hundred and fifty-nine countries around the world have legal obligations to protect the human right to a healthy environment, but Canada does not.
There are environmental bills of rights in Ontario, Quebec, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, but there is no federal law that explicitly recognizes the right to a healthy environment in Canada. Bill S-5 could change that, so it is a positive step forward, but it is important to back up declarations of rights with legislation that enforces those rights. Unfortunately, the previous version of CEPA was considered unenforceable, and this one is no better.
The Senate committee studying Bill S-5 sent the bill to the House with the following message:
This committee would like to state their concern that the right to a healthy environment cannot be protected unless it is made truly enforceable. This enforceability would come by removing the barriers that exist to the current remedy authority within Section 22 of CEPA, entitled “Environmental Protection Action.” There is concern that Section 22 of CEPA contains too many procedural barriers and technical requirements that must be met to be of practical use. As Bill S-5 does not propose the removal or re-evaluation of these barriers, this Committee is concerned that the right to a healthy environment may remain unenforceable.
The reason the Senate did not fix this enforceability issue with amendments is that apparently it would have been considered out of scope, so I would say the government should table separate legislation as soon as possible to remedy this. Again, the government could have missed all of this if it had fixed this problem with CEPA and Bill S-5 before tabling the new version of the bill.
Similarly, there were other major shortcomings in Bill S-5 that were out of scope for amendments, including a lack of legally binding and enforceable air quality standards. It is really quite surprising that the first draft of Bill S-5 made no attempts to address air quality at all. It also lacks a more open, inclusive and transparent risk assessment process for the evaluation of genetically engineered animals in the environment, especially wild salmon. Salmon are a critical part of our aquatic ecosystems and are sacred to first nations that have relied on healthy salmon populations for millennia. The risk of introducing genetically engineered salmon into the wild environment should set off alarm bells on all sorts of fronts.
I would like to mention here that I have a private member's bill, Bill C-219, the Canadian environmental bill of rights, that would extend the right to a clean environment across the federal mandate, not just for toxins and other aspects covered under CEPA, but for all aspects of the environment covered by federal legislation. The heart of Bill C-219 is a transparent accountability process that would allow Canadians to ensure their government is actually upholding the right to a clean environment. That accountability process is missing from Bill S-5 and CEPA. It could have and should have been included. I am hoping that the government and all parties will support my bill and use that part of it as a model to strengthen the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
In conclusion, I would like to make it clear that the NDP will be voting in favour of Bill S-5 at this stage. We are happy that the right to live in a clean and healthy environment has finally been recognized within federal legislation, and we are happy the bill confirms the government's commitment to implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples under the act. However, the bill has many shortcomings, only some of which I have listed above.
I was heartened to hear the speech from the member for West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, in which he admitted these shortcomings and called for a new bill amending CEPA to fix them as soon as possible. Why they were not included in the bill before us, which has been 24 years in the making, is beyond my comprehension, but I would certainly welcome such a bill.
Most Canadians will be happy to see the bill pass, and I know that most parties will be voting for the bill, albeit some reluctantly. I hope the Senate will deal with it promptly so we can enjoy its benefits and quickly start the process of crafting a new bill that will once again make CEPA a stronger act, an act that will truly protect Canadians and ensure that we and our grandchildren can live in the clean and healthy environment that is our right.
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